Posted in: Disney, Movies | Tagged: a wrinkle in time, disney, film

Ava DuVernay Talks Building Worlds In 'A Wrinkle In Time'

Published Wed, 12 Jul 2017 21:58:00 -0500

Fans of the classic novel A Wrinkle In Time have been anxiously awaiting news about the upcoming adaptation by Ava DuVernay. We know that the first trailer is coming this weekend at D23 but Entertainment Weekly has dumped a bunch of images and new information about the movie ahead of that trailer debut.

DuVernay talks about finding the book as an adult, not a child, and falling in love with it.

"I went to school in Compton and it wasn't on my reading list. I saw so much beauty in it, but also so much meaning. She's a very radical thinker and she embedded her sense of what society should and could be in this piece, and a lot of it I agree with," says DuVernay. "And through that, the story of this girl saving the world and being out there in the universe slaying the darkness, it also says a lot about slaying our own dragons."

She also spoke about the amount of freedom she was given, with writer Jennifer Lee, when it came to casting and to building the worlds that the story takes place in.

"The first image [I had in my head] was to place a brown girl in that role of Meg, a girl traveling to different planets and encountering beings and situations that I'd never seen a girl of color in," she explains. "All of those scenes struck my fancy, and then it was also something that [Disney VP of production] Tendo Nagenda said to me, which I'll never forget. One of the things that really made me want to read it was when he said, 'Ava, imagine what you would do with the worlds.' Worlds! 'Planets no one's ever seen or heard of,' he said. There aren't any other black women who have been invited to imagine what other planets in the universe might look and feel like. I was interested in that and in a heroine that looked like the girls I grew up with."

DuVernay talked about her exhaustive search to cast the lead character of Meg and how she eventually settled on newcomer Storm Reid and her brother Charles (Deric McCabe).

"She's got the sweetest, warmest heart, and all that I saw every day was just a further blossoming of the good that is Storm Reid," the director gushes. "She's appropriately named. She's a force."

We also have Meg's parents being played by two fantastic actors. Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Chris Pine, two world-renowned physicists, and Pine's character is the one that vanishes and is the reason Meg has to go out to find him.

"Chris is the first full-on heart-throb type of actor that I've ever worked with," DuVernay notes. "That's how the world sees him. But I always just saw a damn good actor. I saw Z for Zachariah and Hell or High Water, and I just knew I wanted him because I saw, that dude's got chops."

While Pine has been a hit or miss actor for me when he's in the right role he's great. It's nice to see a director look passed his (extremely) pretty face and see the actor beneath.

Summary: After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in order to find him.

A Wrinkle In Time, directed by Ava DuVernay, stars Storm Reid, Chris Pine, Reese Witherspoon, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Peña, and Zach Galifianakis. It will be released March 9th, 2018.

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